The Sleeping Sword (53 page)

Their aims were modest, their expectations of success extremely slight. They were not reformers in the sense that they hoped to make sweeping changes. They could, in fact, see little chance of lasting change at all. Conditions, for perhaps four-fifths of humanity, were very bad and seemed unlikely to get better. They were simply a practical couple who knew that sometimes a girl's whole life could take a disastrous turning because for a vital night or two she had nowhere to go. When they met such a girl they offered her an alternative, not much, of course, just a hard bed in that garden shelter, a decent breakfast, medical treatment if required, a little sound advice which usually was not regarded. Not much, and usually after a day or two, when the cuts and bruises were healed and the hunger-pains gone, when the miscarriage had been tidied up and the swelling in the groin seemed not to be syphilis, the girl was gone too. Usually—not always.

Mrs. Stone would not allow me inside the shelter to begin with, not wishing to give its occupants an impression, as she put it, of being monkeys at the zoo, and she entirely agreed with Camille that, although poverty was the usual and most powerful motive, there were girls who enjoyed this undoubtedly old-established profession and others who did extremely well out of it. I had myself seen Gideon Chard lounging beside the carriage of a woman whose favours would certainly not have come cheap. I had seen women gorgeously attired in satins and towering plumage strolling up and down the Haymarket when I had visited the theatre with Blanche, none of them among the first rank of courtesans, perhaps, like Gideon's, but well fed, cheerful, looking as if they had the means to pay their rent.

But Dr. and Mrs. Stone did not interest themselves in such as these. Nor were they concerned with the little girls of eight and nine years old who could be purchased easily in any of our cities, since such children were offered up by their mothers, more often than not, who would take care of them afterwards. And if it shocked me that there could be such mothers—as, of course, it must shock me—I should remember that these women, in many cases, had been compelled themselves, before the introduction of our various Factory Acts, to labour from the age of five for seventeen hours a day in woollen-mills, cotton-mills, coal-mines, had been deflowered by overlookers, foremen, workmates, their brothers, sometimes their fathers, in those hovels where they slept six or seven to a bed. To such women the loss of virginity for cash in an eight-year-old child could not seem so terrible as it did to me.

Terrible enough, of course. But sharing a practical disposition, Dr. and Mrs. Stone preferred to offer their assistance to the slightly older children, the girls of twelve and thirteen and fourteen one could find in abundance any day of the week at the railway stations of any city, girls from the country sent off to fend for themselves, particularly in these days of agricultural depression, because there was no room at home, or girls who had left home respectably to take up employment and had not given satisfaction, little nursemaids and kitchenmaids discharged without a reference for the crime, sometimes, of being too young to understand what was required of them, and with nowhere to go.

‘Good'girls, of course, and usually quite innocent, unlike the urchins we bred in our cities. And Mrs. Stone was in a position to assure me that every train, in every city including our own, was met regularly by sharp-eyed, soft-tongued women who traded not in simple prostitution but the highly profitable marketing of virginity.

‘Really?' I said and Mrs. Stone smiled, realizing I had believed virginity to be of importance mainly to husbands desirous of producing an heir they could be sure of. But no, for virginity, she told me, within her working memory had been valued as high as sixty or seventy pounds, a sum which had shrunk in recent times to a discreetly profferred five pound note, not for want of customers, she hastened to add, but because the commodity was now so much easier to come by and had lost the value of its rarity.

And why should it be so valuable in the first place? Well, of course, there
were
men who found the deflowering of virgins moving and mysterious, others who required it as an added titillation, but mainly it was seen as a sanitary precaution, a virgin being presumed free from venereal disease. There was no cure for syphilis, she told me, clearly wondering if I had heard the word before, and, as any doctor would tell me—or, at least, any doctor like Patrick Stone—there were times when it reached the proportions of an epidemic. It was a terrible, shameful way to die, but, men's needs being what they were, the risk continued to be taken, and since supply is created by demand she had met several women who had dealt for many years, and very lucratively, in virgins, procuring for some of their regular customers as many as two a week.

The girls were picked up, hungry and frightened, at the stations and in the public parks, persuaded, or in some cases given an entirely false impression of what would be required. Just a kiss and a cuddle, they would be told, a deceit which necessitated the use of rather isolated houses for such transactions, since when the truth dawned some girls would kick and scream, while others—suspected as likely trouble-makers by the procuress—would have been so heavily dosed with laudanum in advance that they would have to be carried inside.

An evil trade, necessitating a rapid turn-over, since the same girl, obviously, could not be used twice. And when the damage was done she would be bundled back into a closed carriage, driven away from that very secret address and abandoned somewhere in an alien street, with perhaps a guinea from that purchase price of £5 in her hand. Sometimes the Stones would find her. Sometimes a more conventional brothel-keeper who did not deal in maidenheads would find her first. Often enough some man would pick her up and take her home with him for a night or two, which would lead, of course, to the brothel in the end. Sometimes, if she was badly torn or badly shocked, she would spend a longer time than usual in the Stones's garden, performing small tasks about the house, and even then the final reaction varied. Some girls would hang their heads in shame and creep tamely away, others would shrug their shoulders and realize they had now learned a trade. And so long as these disease-conscious gentlemen were willing to pay, neither Mrs. Stone nor my friend Camille could see an end to it.

I worked throughout the spring and summer almost obsessively, my enthusiasm and my indignation marking me, I knew, as an amateur, although Liam—professional to his fingertips—made full use of it, sending me, when the St. Mark's Fold survey was done—to equally appalling dens elsewhere in the city, thus proving the evil to be widespread. I listed the sordid details of every house in Commercial Close and the older, rat-infested Silsbridge Street, cowering a mile away from the splendid, Italianate façade of Nethercoats Mill; checked and cross-checked, with a novice's determination to get it exactly right, so eager to inform the world of these injustices which everyone in Cullingford, including myself, had always known and not wished to think about, that personal relationships—the stuff of which my life had hitherto been made—became slightly blurred, faintly unreal. And so it was that the sudden dreaminess of Camille escaped me, or, if it did not, then I had no time to think about it, and consequently missed the choicest scandal to hit Cullingford since my own, which had been going on right under my zealous nose.

‘Do you know,' she said to me one warm and, for me, extremely busy afternoon. ‘Mr. Nicholas Barforth is a very attractive man.'

‘My father-in-law? I suppose he must have been.'

‘But he still is, you may mark my words. That type of man improves with age. The ruthless mellows and the—well—the
attractiveness
remains. And he is not so old.'

Of course she had been giving me a clue, worried—as Liam told me afterwards—that her unlikely yet obviously very satisfactory affair with my father-in-law might shock me; as indeed it did. Not for any reasons of morality but simply because he
was
my father-in-law, because she was beautiful, whimsical, adorable, and because I had rather hoped to see him reconciled to his wife.

It had happened very quickly, taking her so much by surprise that she had told no one, being herself barely able to believe it. They had met at my house and she had been a little irritated and very much amused at his insistence on taking her home in his carriage. They had measured each other, and although she acknowledged his attractions—power, shrewdness, toughness and wealth being a potent blend in any man—she knew they could have little in common and did not expect to get on with him. And they had not got on together. She had sat in his carriage for over an hour, outside her front door, while he poured disapproval—scorn almost—on the life she led, shredding her ideals to pieces while she, just as quickly, patched them up again. The horses had grown restless and he had simply driven off with her to the station, and since it had been nearly dinner-time by then and they had not eaten—well—they had gone to Leeds and dined, she couldn't—or wouldn't—say where, except that it had been extremely elegant and probably outrageously expensive.

They had met again twice that week and on the Friday she had gone with him to Scarborough—yes, so soon—how very shocking!—and had stayed with him until Sunday night, at a house right on the cliff-edge where they had—and here she swallowed and blushed, not from guilt, I thought, but from some quite blissful memory—where they had found themselves in harmony in every possible way. She had been seeing him since then as often as she could, which turned out to be very often, and yes, it was altogether a fit of madness, she would readily admit it, but the mere thought of him caused her to glow and tingle—how utterly insane, yet so
wonderful
, and to feel shivers down her spine—caused her to
long
for him, and she wasn't ashamed of it. She had been to Scarborough almost every weekend since then, surely I had noticed her unseemly haste, the way she had rushed to catch the train? And what of Mr. Barforth, my father-in-law—whom to my amazement she now called Nicholas? Did he long, too?

‘Don't be unkind,' she said. ‘I know you can't believe it of him, but he does. He's beautiful, Grace. Perhaps you can't believe that either. But he is.'

I could hardly bring myself to face him when next we met, not because I blamed him for desiring Camille—how could any man be blamed for that?—but because her blissful, sighing ecstasies had forced me to think of him not so much as an elderly relative but a potent, sensual male, and it embarrassed me. But, whatever his ultimate intentions might be, he made no secret that at present he could not have enough of Camille, and had called to see me solely for the pleasure of talking about her to someone who knew just how desirable she was.

‘Why not?' said Liam Adair, finding me alone in the office the following Thursday morning. ‘So she's gone a day early this time, has she? Well, I didn't think the affair could get much hotter, but it seems I'm wrong. And why not? Every rich old man deserves a young woman to round off his life—or so most rich old men will tell you. Good luck to her.'

‘I rather thought that you and she—?'

‘Ah well—I rather thought myself, at one time, that she and I—But no, she's met too many men like me, and at least Nick Barforth is
different
. I reckon we might send our congratulations to Gideon Chard, for if old Nick's in Scarborough every Friday to Monday—or every Thursday to Tuesday—with Camille, he'll hardly be troubling Gideon overmuch at the mills.'

The story, as yet, was by no means common knowledge, Cullingford needing to be sure of its facts before spreading rumours about its most powerful resident, but I knew they must have been seen together, the gossip would be bound to start, and it would have been a kindness to go over to Galton in case my mother-in-law—his wife—had heard. But I delayed, shirked, fearing to be confronted by a too visible memory of Gervase, and in the end she came to me, bringing fern-scents and tree-scents in the folds of her plain green skirt, her hair spilling out of a hat she had crammed on her head at a rakish and very becoming angle.

‘Now then, my dear,' she said, sitting down and taking off her driving-gloves. ‘I know you are much occupied and very businesslike these days, so I shall not give you reason to accuse me of beating about the bush. I have come to enquire about this gorgeous Camille I have heard so much about. Yes, yes, don't look so astonished, Grace, for we are none of us children, and it is my husband himself who has told me. Now then, the fact that she
is
gorgeous I do not dispute. I can trust Nicky to be accurate about that. But what else is she, Grace? That is what I want to know, for to tell the truth, Nicky has been very disappointed in his women, including myself, and I should not like him to be disappointed again—not now when time is no longer quite so available. So tell me about this paragon.'

I told her and she listened, her head on one side, concentrating hard, and when I had finished she nodded, brisk, assured, a woman who, against all the rules, appeared well content.

‘Well, I did not expect to see him with a social reformer, which sounds a humourless breed, but you tell me she has a great deal of laughter—and generosity. Good. And she is quite besotted with him?'

‘She is in an absolute trance.'

‘That is very good. I think he has always needed that.'

‘Mrs. Barforth, I rather thought that you and he—?'

And, as Liam had done when I asked him a similar question, she gave what amounted to a roguish smile.

‘Yes, I could see you did, and I confess it crossed our minds. When Venetia died we realized how much we had wasted, and we were able to approach each other again, but not as lovers, darling. Yes, we
did
think about it, but the time had gone by for us and it would have been foolish to pretend. Yet Nicky has worried me lately—how strange, for I always thought him so self-sufficient and strong, so distant by his own choice, which of course he was. But since Venetia died I think he has been lonely. He never spent much time with her but I suppose he knew she was there—poor Nicky!—and because she was so frail in spirit he knew she might need him. He wouldn't admit it, and perhaps doesn't know why, but he has been lonely. I have been very far from that. And now that this wonderful thing has happened to him I find that I am glad. I confess to you—and only to you—that there was a moment when I
could
have felt quite otherwise, but no—on the whole I am glad.'